Mary-Love Caskey didn’t pretend to be able to control her son’s actions and emotions the way she could Sister’s. Mary-Love knew that Oscar liked that red-haired schoolteacher next door, and she also knew that it wasn’t her place to tell him that he ought not to like her. Oscar was now the man in the family, and that must stand for something. So Mary-Love was glad that despite the proximity of Oscar and Elinor there had been so little commerce between them. The flood had brought them together, but the aftermath of the flood was—at least for the time being—keeping them apart.
Early one Saturday morning, however—Saturday morning, the twenty-first of June, 1919, to be exact, when the sun had just crossed over from the air sign of Gemini into the water sign of Cancer—Oscar Caskey rose at his usual hour of five, then remembered that it was Saturday and he wouldn’t have to be at the lumberyard until eight o’clock. He would have turned over and tried to sleep another hour then, but he was disturbed by a slight noise outside his window in the still morning. He got up and looked out. The dawn hadn’t yet taken hold of the day. The sand below was a wide dark sea, showing only here and there what remained of Buster’s work from the previous day. And now marring even more of the patterns was Elinor Dammert, coming up from the mooring dock. She held something tightly in one hand.
Oscar was curious. He wanted to know what had brought her out so early in the morning. He wanted to know what was hidden in her closed fist. He wanted the opportunity to speak to her without his mother or James or tiny Grace or any of the servants around. Hurriedly slipping into his pants and boots he clambered down the back stairs, then stood on the back porch and watched Elinor through the screen. Standing in the middle of the expanse of gray sand that sloped all the way down to the river, she was toeing a small hole in the earth.
The sky was pink and canary yellow in the east, but still dark blue—a blue more radiant than that morning’s dawn—in the west. Birds called from across the river, but on this side only a single mockingbird, perched on James Caskey’s kitchen roof, could be heard. From even so far away, Oscar could hear the water lapping against the pilings of the mooring dock. He pushed open the screen door.
Miss Elinor looked up. She dropped something out of her hand; it fell into the small hole at her feet. With the toe of her shoe, she covered the hole with sand.
“What are you doing, may I ask?” Oscar said, stepping outside and descending the steps. His voice sounded oddly hollow, breaking that early morning silence. It was so still that the soft shutting of the screen door behind him produced an echo against the side of James Caskey’s house.
Miss Elinor moved several feet to her right and toed out another small hole. Oscar came nearer.
“I’ve got acorns,” she said.
“You planting them?” Oscar asked incredulously. “Nobody plants acorns. Where’d you get ’em?”
“River washed ’em down,” Elinor replied with a smile. “Mr. Oscar, you want to help me?”
“Acorns aren’t gone do anything here, Miss Elinor. Look at this yard. What do you see here? Do you see sand, sand, and no grass? That’s what I see. I think you are wasting your time planting acorns. Buster is gone come by in a while and rake ’em all up anyway.”
“Buster doesn’t rake deep,” said Elinor. “I’ve told him I was going to plant trees out here. Mr. Oscar, if the grass won’t grow, then we’ve got to have shade at least. So I’m planting acorns.”
“I suppose those are live oak,” said Oscar, examining the four acorns that Elinor dropped into his hand. They were wet, as if indeed she had just scooped them out of the water. She hadn’t said, though, what she was doing down at the mooring dock at five o’clock in the morning; after all, she couldn’t have been waiting for the acorns to wash down the Perdido and into her hand, could she?
“They are not,” she said. “They are water oak.”
“How can you tell?”
“I know what water oak acorns look like. I know what they look like when they wash down the river.”
“And you think they’ll grow here?”
She nodded.
“I don’t know of any stand of water oak up the Perdido,” said Oscar after a pause, as if he were trying to recall one. This was a polite way of contradicting Miss Elinor, for in truth Oscar Caskey knew every tree in Baldwin, Escambia, and Monroe counties, and was perfectly certain that there were no water oak branches overhanging the upper Perdido.
“Must be there, though,” said Elinor as she dropped another acorn into the earth, “if they were washing downstream.”
“I tell you what,” said Oscar as he dug a hole with the heel of his boot and dropped in an acorn. “This afternoon I’ll get off work early and you and I will go out in the wagon.” He covered up the acorn.
“Go out where?” She reached into the pocket of her dress and pulled out another handful of acorns. She dropped several into Oscar’s outstretched palm and held the rest of them herself. As he spoke she continued the planting.
“Out in the woods. You’re gone pick out the trees you like—anything up to twenty-five feet—and I’ll mark ’em with a blue ribbon, and Monday morning I’ll send out some men to dig ’em up and we’ll bring ’em back here and put ’em in. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before. What do I hire men for, anyway? Even if these acorns were to grow—and there’s prettier trees than water oaks, Miss Elinor—it would take ’em so long that you and I would be bent over before they provided enough shade to take off our hats.”
“You’re wrong, Mr. Oscar,” said Elinor Dammert, “and I’m not going to pick out any trees in the woods. But you come back here at three o’clock and I will have Escue’s wagon ready. We will go for that ride.”
. . .
Mary-Love didn’t like it a bit, and that evening after his return, Oscar hardly had time to wash his hands before supper was put on the table.
“What did you talk about?” Sister asked.
“About James and Grace and school. We talked about the flood. Just like everybody else in town.”
“Why were you so long?” asked Mary-Love. She thought that Oscar’s scandalous behavior shouldn’t be talked of at all, but her curiosity overcame her misgivings about sanctioning the episode with her questions.
“I took her out to the Sapps and we bought some cane juice. You know they got a three-year-old girl running that press now? She is so small that they have to lay her on her stomach on that old mule’s back and tie her on with a rope.”
“Those Sapps!” cried Sister. “I declare we are gone end up hiring every one of those nine children just to keep ’em from getting worked to their deaths.”
“So,” said Mary-Love, “you went out to the Sapps and you came right back. That took you three hours and thirty-five minutes?”
“We stopped in and spoke to Miz Driver, that’s all, and Miz Driver gave us some of her early watermelon. We wouldn’t have stopped I think except that Oland and Poland—or it might have been Roland—ran out and stopped the wagon. Those boys think the world of Miss Elinor. You know that those three boys eat watermelon with pepper instead of salt? I had never even heard of that, but Miss Elinor had. Mama, Miss Elinor is smarter than you give her credit for.”
And next door, at the table, Miss Elinor told the same story for Grace and James Caskey.
“But you had a good time,” said James Caskey.
“Oh, yes,” said Miss Elinor, “Mr. Oscar was very good to me.”
“Well, as long as you had a good time,” said James Caskey, “that’s all that matters.”
. . .
Eight days after the planting of the water oak acorns, Elinor Dammert attended morning service in Perdido for the first time. Previously, after Sunday school, Elinor had returned home with Grace, who was thought too little to sit through a sermon. But suddenly Grace had gotten older or was better-behaved—or perhaps Elinor Dammert had a particular wish for wanting to go to church. At any rate, next to Elinor sat Oscar Caskey, and when they rose to sing hymns, h
e held the book open for her as she lifted little Grace in her arms.
Mary-Love didn’t like it, but between stanzas Sister whispered, “Mama, you cain’t expect her to hold Grace and the hymnbook too!”
When they all returned from church that morning, Buster Sapp was waiting on the front steps of James Caskey’s house. He ran up to Miss Elinor, grabbed her hand, and dragged her around to the back.
When the others followed, wondering at Buster’s even being awake at that hour of the morning and even more at his failure to finish his raking on one side of the house, they saw Miss Elinor standing near the back parlor windows. She was smiling broadly. Right beside her, wide-eyed and still astonished, Buster Sapp rocked back and forth on his haunches. With a quivering finger he pointed at a little foot-high oak sapling. The acorn from which it had sprung lay split and rotted and loosely covered with coarse gray sand. And as James Caskey and Mary-Love and Sister and Oscar looked on with astonishment equal to Buster’s, the black child rose and rushed all over the yard, and pointed out seventeen more water oak saplings that had raised themselves overnight in the sterile sandy earth.
Chapter 4
The Junction
What was known for certain about Elinor Dammert’s life in Perdido could be easily summed up: she had been plucked from the Osceola Hotel on Easter morning by Oscar Caskey and Bray Sugarwhite; she lived with James Caskey and took splendid care of his small daughter Grace; she was to teach fourth grade in the fall; and she was being courted by Oscar Caskey whose mother didn’t like it one little bit.
But everything else was a mystery, and seemed likely to remain so. Elinor Dammert was not unfriendly—she always spoke on the street, had a memory for names, and was polite in all the stores—but she didn’t go out of her way to join in the life of the community. In other words, she didn’t gossip—about herself or about others. Nor did she do much that was out of the ordinary—except to live apparently without care that Genevieve Caskey was bound to return someday and raise holy hell that her place in James’s household had been usurped; and to have raised enmity in Mary-Love Caskey, a kind if slightly domineering woman, who had never before been known to dislike anyone who wasn’t a thief or a drunk.
Actually, it was thought that Miss Elinor didn’t really take to life in Perdido. The common remark was that she looked peaked, almost as if she weren’t used to the climate, though how that might be when she was from Fayette County, not all that far north, no one knew. Certainly during these summer months, Miss Elinor spent a great deal of time in the water, and the muscularity of her shoulders—a strange thing in an Alabama woman—was a frequently remarked upon fact. People also said that she looked as if she weren’t getting enough to eat (or perhaps not enough of the right things), though since James kept an ample table and Roxie was one of the best cooks in town, people didn’t see how this explanation of Elinor’s condition could apply.
. . .
Buster Sapp arrived at the Caskeys’ one morning early, even before the sun was up. He had set out from his parents’ home in the country and miscalculated the time needed for the journey into town. As he went around the back of the house, intending to nap for a bit on the back steps, he was startled to see someone standing on the mooring dock. It was Elinor Dammert, and her white shift gleamed in the light of the setting moon. She dived into the river. Buster ran down to the water’s edge and watched her as she swam in easy strong strokes directly across to the other bank. The swift current didn’t deflect her an inch. This astounded Buster, who knew with what difficulty strong-armed Bray paddled from one bank to the other.
Before she had quite reached the other side, Elinor turned, and raised her head above the water. “I see you, Buster Sapp!” she cried out. The swift water flowed strongly past her, but Miss Elinor seemed immovably anchored.
“I’m here, Miss El’nor!” Buster called back. He was already quite in awe of the woman, because of the water oaks she had planted. Buster, raking around their slender trunks each morning, noticed daily growth. Was that natural? His sister Ivey told him it was because the acorns had been planted at the dark of the moon, but even that seemed an insufficient explanation.
“You come in here with me and we’ll swim down to the junction!”
“Current is too strong, Miss El’nor! And I don’t know what’s in that water at night! They was oncet a alligator up in the Blackwater Swamp—Ivey told me. She told me that alligator ate up three little baby girls and spit up their bones on a sandbar!”
Grinning, Miss Elinor rose up straight in the early morning air until Buster could see her white bare feet shining beneath the surface of the black water. Then, in a graceful easy motion and without bending she toppled sideways into the current and began to slip gracefully downstream.
Buster knew what the whirlpool was like at the confluence of the Perdido and the Blackwater no more than a quarter of a mile away. He feared that Miss Elinor would drown. Help couldn’t come in time even if he called, however, so the black boy ran along the bank of the river, stumbling occasionally on the exposed roots of trees, following Miss Elinor’s white shift glowing just below the surface of the water. As he scrambled through a little screening thicket of pin oaks and magnolias, his trouser leg caught on a thorn and he had to sit down and carefully free himself. Rushing on, he soon found himself in the empty field in back of the courthouse. Here before him was the junction, where the red water of the Perdido and the black water of the Blackwater met, fought, and then were both sucked into the swiftly revolving maelstrom at the center.
Behind him the town hall clock began to toll five o’clock. He turned and stared a moment at its green-illuminated face. Miss Elinor ought to have got this far by now—she had been swimming fast, and Buster had been waylaid in the pin oak thicket. But he didn’t see her anywhere. Had she already been dragged down? Buster trembled. Then suddenly he saw her head bob above the surface of the water a dozen yards upstream. The water flowed swiftly around her motionless body as if she had snagged there, but the Perdido was deep and without snags in that place. Then, almost as if she had simply waited for Buster to find her, Miss Elinor resumed her downstream journey. Buster watched with perfect terror as she moved on and then was caught up in the circular motion of the junction proper. Absolutely still and straight, and a few inches below the surface, she went round and round in the whirlpool. Buster called out wildly: “Miss El’nor! Miss El’nor! You gone drown!”
The woman was being drawn in closer and closer to the center of the spinning vortex. She stretched out her arms before her, and her body began to blend itself into the curve of the maelstrom. Soon, Buster saw, her body had formed itself into a complete circle. She had taken hold of her own toes, and she formed a white frame around the black whirling hole of the downspout.
Suddenly the circle of white skin and cotton that was Elinor Dammert sank out of Buster’s sight.
He was overwhelmed with the certainty that this woman he so respected was doomed. Ivey told him that something lived right at the bottom of that whirlpool, something which during the day buried itself in the sand, but at night dug itself out again and sat on the muddy riverbed and waited for animals to get pulled down the whirlpool. But what it liked best was people. If you ever got pulled down there, it grabbed you so tight that your arms got broken and you couldn’t fight back. Then it licked the eyeballs right out of your head with its black tongue. Then it ate your whole head, and then it buried the rest of your body in the muck so that nobody would ever find out what became of you. It looked mostly like a frog, but it had the tail of an alligator, and that tail swept the riverbed constantly, keeping all the bodies buried so that none of them ever floated up to the surface. It had one red gill for Perdido water and one black one for the Blackwater. If it got real hungry it came up on the land—once Ivey had seen its trail from the riverbank to the house in Baptist Bottom where a washerwoman’s two-year-old boy had disappeared the night before, and nobody ever found out what became of that child. Whatever
it was, whatever waited on the murky riverbed for unlucky swimmers, whatever crawled up the clayey banks on dark nights; whatever that thing was, Ivey had assured her brother, it had been there before Perdido was built, and would be there when Perdido was no more.
Buster was now standing on a small piece of clay riverbank that jutted into the river. What Buster couldn’t see was that it had been undermined by the action of the current. Suddenly it gave way. Flailing and screeching, Buster Sapp was thrown into the water. He tried to scramble up the bank again, and could feel the hard clay beneath his feet, giving him hope of recovery, but suddenly the circular motion of the junction seemed to enlarge itself to the very banks of the rivers. Inexorably, Buster was pulled away from the achingly close safety of that bank and into the whirlpool. He tried frantically to swim downstream, but he remained in the turning current.
As he was pulled beneath the surface of the water, he opened his eyes for a moment and saw distorted the green clock face on the town hall. He screamed, and muddy water filled his mouth.
A large pine branch was also caught up in the maelstrom, and he grasped it as a spar to keep him afloat; but the branch was no more anchored than he, and they simply spun along together. He managed to get his head above the surface for a moment and catch two breaths of air, then was sucked below again. He was closer now to the downspout, spinning around ever more quickly.
He let go of the pine branch suddenly, and leaped out of the water—or at least he performed the motion of leaping, for he succeeded only in initiating a tumbling motion below the surface of the water. He was not only going around and around, he was being tossed head over heels in a dizzying succession of somersaults—and being inexorably drawn nearer the center.
Blackwater: The Complete Caskey Family Saga Page 7
